Wednesday, June 04, 2014

Heal Faster, Dammit!

Hello! I am still here! However sporadically I may be communicating.

I had my two-week follow-up appointment with my doctor, who says that my surgical incision is healing very nicely indeed. It's all taking a while, of course, but that is to be expected. Still, I'm getting there, I guess, however slowly. My mother, having stayed for a little over two weeks taking care of me (and picking up all kinds of things I accidentally dropped on the floor), is finally on her way home, having been at least mostly convinced that I will be able to feed myself and the cats in her absence. (Which I will be, although there are a lot of frozen entrees in my future, I fear.)

Number of books read so far since my surgery: nine and a half. Which is respectable enough, I think. Although I have discovered the flaw in my plan to "read like it's my full-time job" during my convalescence, which is that, well, there are good reasons why I'm not doing my actual full-time job at the moment, and one of them is that healing this kind of damage takes a ridiculous amount of energy. So everything goes very slowly, even more so than it would otherwise, and come the afternoon, more often than not, I need to stop and "rest my eyes" for an hour or so. Still, I at least feel vindicated for all those shelves full of unread books I've accumulated, because when I am awake and not engaged in the basic maintenance tasks of feeding and cleaning myself, lying around losing myself in a book is practically the only thing I want to do.

I fear it's all going to get old fast from here on out, though. Yes, time to lie around and read is great, but, man, I'd trade significant sums of money just to be able to sleep comfortably on my side again. And to be able to reach every part of myself in the shower. And to be able to get up off the sofa without engaging in several minutes' worth of careful gymnastics to avoid using my abdominal muscles as much as possible. Man, you don't realize just how much you use your abdominal muscles for until they're not available! Then again, you don't realize just how much you can do with your feet until you need to.

But the number one biggest thing I think I've learned from this whole experience is that, despite everybody's dire warnings not to because it WILL BE STOLEN OMG!, bringing an mp3 player to the hospital is the best idea ever. I think those back episodes of Radiolab saved my sanity when I wasn't quite up to reading. Because, even when I'm on morphine, I will never, ever be desperate enough for daytime television.